Sakine Cansiz

Sakine Cansiz, who has been shot dead in Paris aged 54, was a founding member
of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the revolutionary Marxist movement
which took up arms against the Turkish state in the 1980s, demanding an
independent Kurdistan and beginning a long-running conflict in which 45,000
people have been killed, most of them Kurds.

Numbering some 25 million people, mainly living in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Kurds are the world’s largest stateless minority. After the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1918 they were promised their own state in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. But the new Turkish government refused to agree, so in 1923 a new treaty was drawn up with no mention of Kurdistan.

The Kurds have suffered terrible abuse in nearly all the countries where they form a minority, but it is in Turkey that the Kurdish struggle has been most complex and costly. Months after the declaration of a Turkish republic, Ankara, under the pretext of creating an “indivisible nation”, adopted an ideology aimed at marginalising non-Turkish elements within the Republic.

A 1924 mandate forbade Kurdish schools, organisations and publications. Even the words “Kurd” and “Kurdistan” were outlawed. Following a series of revolts, Turkish Kurdistan was put under martial law and by the outbreak of the Second World War, by some estimates, some 1.5 million, a third of the Kurdish population, had been deported or killed.

During a relatively liberal period in the 1950s, Kurds began working within the framework of the Turkish Republic to further their interests, but progress ground to a halt following a military coup in 1960. In the 1970s a new generation of Kurdish nationalists led the movement in a more militant, Marxist direction.

Sakine Cansiz was born in Turkey’s Tunceli province in 1958 and was 20 years old when she joined a small group of fellow militants at a meeting in a teahouse at Fis, in south-east Turkey, that gave birth to the PKK in 1978.

After the Right-wing military coup of September 1980, she and other PKK members were arrested and locked up in the notorious Diyarbakir prison, where 34 inmates died of torture between 1981 and 1989, with hundreds more maimed. The treatment meted out to PKK members and other political prisoners at Diyarbakir is said to be one of the main reasons for the group’s decision to take up arms against the state in 1984, with the aim of creating an independent Kurdistan in the mainly Kurdish areas of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran.

Sakine Cansiz led the Kurdish protest movement inside prison, and after her release in 1991 and a period of training at a PKK camp in the Lebanese Bekaa Valley (then under Syrian control), joined the armed struggle in northern Iraq under the code-name Sara. It was there that she started to organise the PKK women’s movement. It is estimated that by 1993 one-third of the PKK’s armed forces were women.

During the conflict, which reached a peak in the mid-1990s, the PKK committed terrible atrocities, including many large-scale massacres of civilians. Thousands of villages were destroyed in the largely Kurdish south-east and east of Turkey, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled to cities in other parts of the country. Sakine Cansiz’s women recruits were prominent among PKK suicide bombers who committed several acts of terrorism in the early 1990s.

In 1992 Sakine Cansiz was sent to Germany by the PKK’s leadership to coordinate the PKK’s attempts to get financial and political support from the Kurdish diaspora in Europe. In 2001, however, the PKK was listed as a terrorist organisation by the EU, and in 2007 a Turkish warrant led to her arrest — though the German courts refused to extradite her and she was subsequently released. Later she moved to France, where she had been granted political asylum.

The execution-style killing of Sakine Cansiz and two other women at a Kurdish centre in Paris has sparked claim and counter-claim about the likely motives for the attack.

In recent years the successes of Turkish counter-insurgency strategy, the capture of the PKK’s leader Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya in 1999, and a subsequent leadership struggle within the PKK, have weakened the organisation. The PKK has modified its demands from full independence to seeking greater Kurdish rights and limited autonomy in south-east Turkey, and is now involved in peace negotiations with the Turkish authorities.

Sakine Cansiz’s murder occurred shortly after news reports that Ocalan (to whom she was once said to have been close), had agreed a deal on a road map for ending the conflict. This has led to speculation that the killings could be somehow linked to this development, with Turkish sources suggesting that the attack appeared to be the result of an “internal feud” within the PKK, perhaps carried out by dissidents opposed to peace talks. Kurdish sources, however, have blamed government hitmen.